“It’s After the End of the World (Don’t You Know That Yet?)”
Swimming in the aftermaths of Eastman Kodak
Jan 30, 2026 — 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Eighty percent of all the film in the world is said to have been made at Eastman Kodak’s massive chemical plant in Rochester, New York. The factory is situated on the Genesee River, and for decades, Kodak flushed manufacturing waste directly into its waters. While the word Genesee itself comes from the Seneca, Jo-nis-hi-yuh, meaning “beautiful valley,” in the twentieth century, the river became the most polluted waterway in New York State.
Swimming in the aftermaths of Eastman Kodak
But the Genesee is more than an archive of harm or a locus of toxic risk; it is also a source of pleasure. In this paper, I figure it as a narrative device to relate my own embodied encounter with the river to the surveyors, speculators, and miasmas that transformed this landscape in the 1790s. I connect these historical moments through the phenomenon of “Genesee Fever”: first a miasmatic illness, then a term for speculative land frenzy, and finally the name my friends and I gave to the symptoms we developed after swimming. As others have pointed out, miasma is a useful heuristic for industrial pollution. It also works as a metaphor for culture itself. Like the vapors once thought to emanate from the Genesee, Kodak film, in the twentieth century, constituted an immersive sensory surround. Through consumer products and mass media, film became a mirror through which consumers formed their self-image and visions of what the “good life” should look like. To jump into the Genesee is to shatter the mirror image on the surface and to displace, at least momentarily, the normative fantasies that circulated through Kodak products.
Through this watery figuration, this paper argues for a pedagogy of pleasure. New sensations—a play of light, the buoyancy of water, the transgression of dissolution—can open new ethical orientations, but to attend to the textures of the world is to expose oneself to risk, to the knowledge that death is the price of living here. There is no world with rivers but this one, and no rivers without plastics or PFAS. To find pleasure in the Genesee is to insist that this world is worth saving and this life worth living, even amidst ruins and as the normative script for the good life seems ever more out of reach.
Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist. She teaches at Clarkson University and is co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review. Her current book project, Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World, is an historical ethnography of the U.S. twentieth century through the materiality of Kodak film.